#1787: Blending the Elements of Experiential Design & Process-Relational Foundations of the Elements

I gave a lecture about "Blending the Elements of Experiential Design" on Saturday, June 6, 2026 at Seattle XR in Seattle, Washington. (PDF of Slides]. At the end, I run through some examples of the types of interdisciplinary fusion that I see within the context of immersive storytelling and immersive art. This lecture also digs into the process-relational philosophical foundations, as well as how I'm gaining additional inspiration from Empedocles, Aristotle, and the Classical Quadrivium (Four Arts) of Math, Music, Geometry, and Astronomy. For my 30+ hours of coverage of Venice Immersive, then I apply this archetypal framework to help describe the context, quality, character, and story of each of these projects. You can see an overview of how I've been using this framework in this PDF on "Venice Immersive 2025 Archetypal Categorizations"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01M5NcOYzx0

One of goals of this talk was to further define the archetypal nature of the elements, and how I'm conceiving of them as a possibility space of design tradeoffs (C.S. Peirce's "Firstness"), but also as the concrete decisions that an experiential designer makes ("Secondness"), and then finally how these decisions are experienced more from a phenomenological experience as the audience as we feel, sense, act, and make sense of these experiences, and what they might mean ("Thirdness").

I do not actually dive into Peirce's concepts of Firstness, Secondness, or Thirdness in this specific talk, but I wanted to elaborate on these concepts in this write-up as these have been crucial concepts to help translate the overall abstract Firstness quality of my talk, and ground it into the Secondness of something that is a bit more practical and pragmatic. For Peirce, his semiology is grounded into a triune theory of actualization that goes from a non-Boolean possibility space as Firstness, and then grounds into a Boolean actualization of secondness, and then an interpretant mediates from the concreteness of the Secondness object back to the Firstness of the fundamental archetypal qualities or meaning. I find speculative philosopher James Bradley's summary of the Peirce's triune semiology to be the most easy to digest in his essay titled, "Beyond Hermeneutics: Peirce’s Semiology as a Trinitarian Metaphysics of Communication." I can also recommend this article on "Peirce's Theory of Signs" from the The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for a comprehensive recap, and there's also this excellent YouTube series primer by Philosign's Markus Raninen titled The Basics of Semiotics. But here's Bradley's description of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, which I find myself coming back to again and again.

"Within the fundamental speculative triunity of activity, difference and order, or firstness, secondness and thirdness, semiology is an analysis of order or thirdness… Thirdness is analyzed as idea or sign, as the exchange of information between individual entities, and as interpretation; in other words, thirdness is itself a threefold of sign, object and interpretant. Here, sign occupies the position of firstness because it is the potentiality for interpretation; object occupies that of secondness because it is determinate; and the interpretant occupies that of thirdness because the interpretant has the sign-interpreting or sign-ordering role, and so has the status of a third. [24] Thus for Peirce semiology is the analysis of the triune relation of sign, object and interpretant."

It's still a bit obtuse, and one way that I like to think about it is through the experience of communication. You have a possibility space of meaning you want to convey (Firstness of the sign/potential), then you choose specific words that convey that meaning (Secondness of the object), then someone listens to those words and phrases, and then connects those words back to a meaning space (Thirdness of the interpretant mediating between the two). For Peirce, each of the Firstness, Secondne